Website building systems (WBS) have become very popular and allow website builders to build professional looking and functioning websites. Many of these systems provide both the novice and experienced user with ways of building websites from scratch.
A website building system may be a standalone system or may be embedded inside a larger editing system. It may be operated on-line, i.e. websites may be edited and stored on a server, off-line or partially on-line where the web sites are being edited locally and uploaded later to a central server.
Websites are typically made up of one or more visually designed applications. For example, a single website may consist of a blog, an e-shop and a support forum. Each such application, typically consisting of pages, contains components.
Components may be shape components, picture components, text components, single- and multi-page containers containing mini-pages, etc. Components may be content-less such as a star-shape which does not have any internal content (through it has color, size, position and some other parameters) or may have internal content, such as a text paragraph component, whose internal content includes the displayed text, as well as font, formatting and layout information. This content may, of course, vary from one instance of the text paragraph component to another.
Components are typically arranged in a hierarchy of containers, (each of which may be a single page or multi-page) inside the page containing atomic components. A multi-page container may display multiple mini-pages. Pages may also include third party applications (TPAs)—components provided by a (non WBS vendor) third party. Pages may also use templates—full website templates, general page templates or component templates. Specific cases for templates include the use of a master page containing components replicated in some or all other regular pages, and the use of a page header and/or footer (which are repeated on some or all of the pages). The arrangement of components inside a page is called a layout.
A WBS is typically offered by a WBS vendor and is used by users, known as designers, who design the websites using the WBS. The created websites themselves are hosted on the WBS and are accessed and used by end-users.
The same WBS may offer a set of different solutions for different markets. Such solutions are called vertical solutions, also known as “verticals”, each aimed at different markets, such as photography, music, e-commerce, generic small and medium-sized business (SMBs), loyalty club, client support, messaging etc. Such vertical solutions may typically include customizable templates for the whole website (or for specific pages, page sections or components) as noted above. The system may also support sub-verticals, i.e. specific sub-classes of main verticals. For example, photography vertical may include sub-verticals specializing in fashion photography, food photography, wedding photography and so on. A vertical solution may include vertical specialized elements (VSEs) which are elements that are embedded into the vertical solution in addition to the regular components and TPA's provided by the WBS. Such VSEs may, for example, implement display functionality, underlying business logic, communication etc. Such VSEs may also include, for example, vertical specific code inside the WBS client code, which is the part of the WBS that runs on the user's client machine, which is activated through hooks available to the components, client-side pre-installed native code elements, such as those supported by the ActiveX technology of Microsoft Corp., or any other browser extension technologies. Moreover, some server-side logic may be implemented by the WBS in order to support functionality of a specific vertical application. This may include logic implemented on the WBS itself or on 3rd party servers.